Bernie Masters is a geologist/zoologist who spent 8 years as a member of the Western Australian Parliament. Married to Carolina since 1976 and living in south west WA, Bernie is involved in many community groups. This blog offers insights into politics, the environment and other issues that annoy or interest him. For something completely different, visit www.fiatechnology.com.au for information about vegetated floating islands - the natural way to improve water quality.

Friday, April 21, 2017

Doom and gloom won't save the world

Doom and gloom won't save the world

The best way to encourage
conservation is to share our success stories, not to write obituaries for the
planet, says Nancy Knowlton.

18 April
2017

Early in my career, I witnessed
first-hand the depressing side of the job. The coral reefs off the north coast
of Jamaica, where I had spent several magical years as a graduate student in
the mid 1970s, were struck by a category-5 hurricane in 1980. Then came mysterious
ailments that devastated two of the most important coral species, along with a
species of sea urchin that, because of previous overfishing, had become the
last defence against a tide of seaweed that was choking the struggling coral.
Ten years after my first dive in Jamaica, the reefs I'd studied were all but
gone.

These days, students studying
reefs spend their time investigating bleaching and acidification, terms that
were never mentioned when I took my first coral-reef class in 1974.

As we observe Earth Day on 22
April, it's worth recounting how researchers like myself have managed to
rebound a bit from all this depressing news.

In 2001, my colleagues and I at
the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California, founded the
Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation. Core to our programme was an
interdisciplinary summer course, which brought together students ranging from
marine biologists to physical oceanographers, economists and anthropologists.
We thought of it as medical school for the ocean.

We began with what we thought was
a logical starting point — the state of the ocean. These were depressing
lectures. Doom and gloom consumed the entire course. Basically, we were
training our students to write ever-more-refined obituaries for the seas.

We quickly realized the folly of
focusing so much on the problems — we could see it on our students' faces.
There had to be another way. After all, in medical school the focus is on
preserving life, not describing death. So in 2009, my husband Jeremy Jackson
and I began running symposia at academic meetings called 'Beyond the
Obituaries', which were about success stories in ocean conservation. A small
workshop in 2014 led to a Twitter campaign, #OceanOptimism, which has now
reached more than 76 million Twitter accounts.

On the weekend of Earth Day, the
first ever Earth Optimism Summits will take place. In Washington DC, more than
235 scientists and civic leaders from 24 countries will share their success
stories of conservation on land and water. Sister summits and activities are
being held in nine countries around the globe. The goal is to learn from each
other, and change the conservation conversation.

This journey has taught me
several lessons. First, unrelenting doom and gloom in the absence of solutions
is not effective. Social scientists have known for decades that large problems
without solutions lead to apathy, not action. Yet much of conservation
communication still seems to be focused on scaring people into caring.

As a community, we seem to be
addicted to despair. For example, when the West Indian manatee (Trichechus
manatus) was bumped down from endangered to threatened status under the US
Endangered Species Act last month, many environmentalists protested and worried
about relaxed protections, rather than celebrating the practices (boat speed
limits and winter-refuge safeguards) that enabled the animals' partial
recovery.

Second, an extraordinary number
of success stories are largely unknown — not just to the general public but
also to conservation scientists, policymakers and philanthropists. Searching
Twitter for #OceanOptimism (and its offspring #EarthOptimism) is still one of
the best ways to find examples. My favourite instance of unrecognized success
was the 2015 announcement of the recovery of seagrasses in Tampa Bay, Florida,
to 1950s levels. Of the 300 or so people I have mentioned this to (including
200 marine scientists at a research meeting in Tampa), fewer than 10 were aware
of this important conservation achievement, which was the result of keeping
fertilizer-filled run-off waters from flowing into the bay. Elsewhere, stocks
of Chilean loco (an edible sea snail), Madagascar octopus and marine fish in
parts of the Philippines are healthier thanks to the establishment of
small-scale, locally empowered, sustainable fisheries.

Many young people have told me
and my colleagues that our messages of optimism energize them and provide
direction and inspiration. They also tell us that they almost left the field
because so many of their courses were dispiriting.

Let me be clear: I am no
Pollyanna when it comes to the future of the planet. The catastrophic coral
bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef this year and last cannot be denied. The problems
remain huge: daunting even. Conservation is often two steps forward, one step
back — or frustratingly, one step forward, two steps back.

But we must also celebrate
successes: species brought back from the brink of extinction, landscapes and
seascapes protected or newly restored, and the integration of sustainability
into corporate boardroom decisions. Even when these success stories are shared,
we often undermine them with caveats and bury the story of how they were
accomplished. Yet talking about these successes is how we will learn to expand
them.